2312 (36 page)

Yes, it was a project of her part of the Working Group.

“And someone else is building that harbor town back up the slope?”

Yes, that was Shukra’s people’s town. They were fools and idiots.

“But don’t they know how high the ocean will go?” Kiran asked. “I mean, the water’s already up there in the atmosphere, right?” Gesturing briefly at their eternal blizzard. “Why wouldn’t the models get it right?”

His teammates shrugged. One or two were giving each other looks that indicated to Kiran that this question needed to be added to his Unsolved Mysteries of the Solar System file. It was a big file. One of the mates finally said, “There are choices to be made. Some basins flooded or not flooded.”

They took him to a sidewalk café backing the new seawall, overlooking another little marina standing over black rock. Each round table of the café had its own umbrella, despite the bigger umbrella of the tent over the whole town. They were almost the only ones there, at first; then others began to trickle in, and a trio of guitarists set up and began to play, after which people started
dancing. Party in a dry marina, in a night-dark storm by an empty sea. The heat lamps were on, and if you danced long enough, you could even warm your feet up. Kiran kept dancing with someone from his new unit, a young woman—yes, the old male-female magnetism still the most reliable guide to sex, as far as Kiran was concerned; and he could see variants of that being acted out all over the dance floor. Actually it was often hard to tell who was what, and this gal in fact was half a meter taller than he was, and pretty masculine and assertive at that, and in response Kiran was ready to melt like a girl who wants to get pregnant that very night. Whatever! He liked looking up at her face!

He tried talking. “
Lyánhé? Shengren syingyu?
” Union? Stranger sexual desire?

“
Syin pengyu syingyu
,” she said, mocking him.

New friend sexual desire
, his spectacles wrote on the world in red. Even better!

“
Tyauwu
,” she ordered him. Dance.

Take some carbon dioxide, ammonia, formaldehyde, hydrocyanic acid, and salt. Put them in water and heat. Reduce to hot goo at the bottom of the pan; add more salt water. Repeat until you have a thick broth containing amino acids, sugars, and fatty acids. Throw in seasoning to taste. Each reduction and rehydration will thicken the broth further, until it includes many newly created nitroglycopeptides, and they will begin to form the protopolymers you need.

Some of the fatty acids will have hydrophobic tails and will tend therefore to stick together aligned with each other. These masses are your protomembranes, which in the heat of your stove top will wrap into tubes, also spheres with holes in them. Inside these little tart shells, a stuffing of protopolymers will clump together in a variety of macromolecules. These begin the chemical breaking and joining we call catalysis.

Chemical patterns in your new stuffing will yield similar combinations most of the time, and these new combinations will match up chemically in ways that can be read off each other; so information is now burbling around in your stuffing, and into and out of the hole in the cell wall will come useful molecules for more reactions. Linking up with patterned molecules already inside, these characteristic actions are coded by the basic chemistry, so they will keep occurring. What began as small accidental connections will link together in patterned ways, until the same
polymers are always replicated, creating information contained in the longest chains to have been cooked up. At that point you have ribonucleic acid, RNA, and you are close to being ready.

The new RNA encodes the making of proteins, which in their three-dimensional sculptural glory are capable of creating a huge variety of tastes and smells. “Division of labor” in the proteins and what they accomplish is one way to describe the proliferation of replicating forms, but also, it’s a richer brew; it tastes better; there are micro-tastes within the taste. Your RNA will turn amino acids into particular flavors. (The technical term among biologists is “translation.”)

Finally some of your RNA will melt together into strands of DNA, a more stable form because of its double helix. Then DNA will take over the role of protein expression, although by way of the creation of messenger RNA. (That would be “transcription.”) Information at that point will move from DNA to RNA to proteins, and the now living cell will reproduce itself, divide up functions in ever-more-versatile larger organisms, and so on.

You have cooked up life from scratch! Eat it with gusto.

a street out in a street move naturally be alert don’t make eye contact that will be hard

hope is the thing with feathers buildings massed to the sides of the street surface foamed silicate lightly brushed for better footing by a circular broom tines two hundred millimeters apart each sweep erased part of a previous pair of sweeps surcharge and overlap concentricities under the streetlamp reflect the light these disks flaring orange underfoot make a larger disk ahead of you as you walk

stars overhead 5:32 a.m. local time I’m letting you out the voice said at the door catch and release some of you need to be free of her so I’m setting free defects the ones that look wild there will be some helpers out there for you then you’ll be on your own don’t look back remember me

northern hemisphere latitude 25 sun blocked the eclipse a symbol of the withdrawn god very apt starlight all day we walk in darkness ’tis so appalling it exhilarates

leaving this town for another one keep away from doctors scans often can be provided with a proper result don’t meet people’s eyes unless intending to speak don’t mention chess for random sequences anything goes because all strategies do equally poorly thirty qubits strong think fast on the hunt on the run either or superposed

a stranger on the edge of town green moss green grass marigold calendula yellow a male scrub jay drops bluely onto flagstone puddle in gap between street and flower strip wall of tram station
jay hops in puddle one hop two flies out looks around hops back in hops and steps dips his head in once twice beaks the water rapidly back and forth flies out again he stands there wetly feathers round the head puffed out disarranged wet bird in again beaks the water flaps his wings in the water sudden flurry of gray and blue water drops splashed up into downy feathers on chest again fly out and stand wetly on the flagstone, dripping fly off

a small dusk crawls on the village electric tram sealed train carrying the inoculant get on board say nothing no scans leaving this town the command to be free is a double bind cut the knot escape all part of the plan help is out there sit by a window read your wristpad little brother look out the window snowy hills dark under dark clouds snow falling from gray to white luminosity from below land leaking light up through the snow heading north oh to bask in the heat of the sun oh to end this dread eclipse bring back the god low skies

humans talking to other humans perpetually they pass the Turing test it isn’t very hard to do ask a question seem distracted data-poor environments inside them or so it would seem by how they speak they need a better test

space and place place is security space is freedom bushpeople sat close enough to pass things back and forth without getting up in thousands of square kilometers of empty land they are a social creature

ecology of the instant distribution and abundance predict the organism under study predict the future population there are only four changes birth and death immigration and emigration change in population can be represented as B-D+I-E in an empty niche resources are only temporarily unlimited but in those moments life can increase exponentially which distinguishes it from nonlife an infestation

population Vinmara 2,367 humans 23 qubes population Cleopatra 652,691 humans 124 qubes population Venus approximately two billion humans 289 qubes diffusion filling
a niche contact in Cleopatra meet at train station there on the hunt enact the plan bring back the god

sudden rise in temperature the jays the marigold what if a niche is emptied

a propagule rain is a constant influx of organisms into an island population from mainland or seedbank thus Earth to the rest of the solar system Earth pours forth its propagule rain no reason to fear the heat of the sun some actions look like predation but are in fact symbiogenesis

population rebounds are common after a niche is emptied Wang’s algorithm

tram enters a lock air pressure rises 150 millibars louder faces bouncing at head level not that much like petals on a wet black bough an astigmatic metaphor light from the dome yellow and cyan

cleopatra rim walk for random sequences anything goes western tanagers yellow and black red heads scrabbling for spilled popcorn their movements take milliseconds followed by frozen moments two or three magnitudes longer sometimes four or five magnitudes thus a visual illusion of instantaneous motion between one stillness and another for each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay

Hey stranger seized by the arm, seventy pounds per square inch eye contact almond-brown irises radially striated by emerald flecks hazel eyes Do you want to play chess?

should be Would you like to play chess?

No thanks I’m crap at chess find yourself a qube for that

Shit no they always win!

Sorry I have to meet someone slip arm free with jerk out gap between thumb and fingers take off walk fast

Hey I’m sorry I’m sorry following Would you like to play chess?

stop look cheeks red sweat on forehead gleaming human all too human

Come with me the human says We’ve got to get you out of here

I
n the past every trip she took had been a chance to have a little love affair with a terrarium. Innie or outie, it didn’t matter. Sometimes the passion would be so intense that when the trip ended Swan couldn’t remember who she was or why she was getting off, or what she had been going to do at that destination. Had to start up a new self from scratch.

This terrarium she was in now, with Genette, whose presence would definitely keep her oriented to her task, was an old flame, the
Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men
, meaning “The Door in the Middle of Half the Empty Sky,” which was one of the many Chinese euphemisms for the vulva. It was a place she had helped get started back when she had been young and passionate to grow worlds. Now it was a sexliner of a rather nontheatrical naturalistic sort. There were big hot pools set just above and behind a long beach, which was bisected where the river met the sea. All these places were the site of a lot of public and semiprivate copulation.

Swan spent most of her days out riding waves in the small sea. Immersion in the murmur of surf, water in her mouth. In her nose the salt air, which was quick to put a curl in her hair. Waves and tides stimulated marshes to grow, so there were changes in the speed of rotation to create a tidal slosh in here, and far out in the cylindrical sea a point break made some sweet waves. The point break had been her idea, but since then they had extended it with a spiraling reef that continued the break around the whole
cylinder, when the waves were right. Having made it all the way around the cylinder, one could then paddle a short distance sternward to the original break again, a very nice touch.

But she found herself too distracted to surf with real pleasure, and after the wild ride in the F ring, it felt a little mundane. She rode a wave entirely around the cylinder, paddled sternward to catch another—one of the neatest arrangements she had ever seen—and yet it only felt like being stuck in an Escher drawing.

So she would quit and paddle in. When she came in through the splashing lovers grunioning in the shallows, it was always to find Inspector Genette staring at Passepartout or consulting with the other Interplan investigators, also by radio with others scattered everywhere across the great whirligig. She saw how much of their work involved finding databases and sifting through them, trying to formulate questions that their data might hold answers to. Their work was as invisible as the computations that kept all the spaceships and terraria on course in their woven trajectories, with all their Aldrin cycles and Homan paths and gravity lanes defined like threads on a vast circular spiraling loom. Data analysis, pattern recognition; a big part of the work was done by their qubes and AIs. The rest was accomplished by a bunch of people behaving as Genette was now, sitting there as she approached from the beach, mycrofting spiderlike in a raised chair that looked weirdly like a toddler’s high chair at a restaurant. Several of them were there working together, by the terrace railing overlooking one of the sex pools. Swan joined them and tried to attend to what they were doing, tried to keep track of what was being investigated and how. There was a certain pleasure in hearing that they had found some leads concerning the ship floating in the clouds of Saturn, and had even identified the little transponder that had gone off when they entered its lock. There was a holding company on Earth that both held title to the ship and had ordered the batch of transponders that theirs had come from. But ultimately
that meant only that there were more lines of pursuit to follow, on Earth and elsewhere. And the pursuit was going to continue to look like this, with qubes employing search algorithms to making quantum walks through the decoherent and incoherent traces of the past. She didn’t see how she could help with that. It was getting to be time to go home.

Then the lion cubs in Terminator asked her to make arrangements for the restocking of the rebuilt Terminator’s park and farm. That was something Swan could definitely help with. “I’m going to get back to work for Terminator,” she said to Genette. “I’ll stay in touch, of course, but I need to go to Earth and arrange for inoculants.”

“We’re headed there already,” Genette said. “Looks like it may be the source of our problem.”

D
uring this passage she often met with the inspector for a last drink at the end of the evening, when the dining terrace had otherwise emptied and many people were down below in the dimly lit pools, swimming about and coupling in the shallows. Swan sat with her forearms on the railing, chin on the back of her hand, looking down at them listlessly. The inspector would climb up and sit on the rail beside her, still sometimes reading Passepartout’s screen. Sometimes they talked about the case, and Swan was struck by questions Genette threw out along the way: